INTRODUCTION:

Media entrepreneurship in Web 3.0 is focused on the entrepreneurial activities of individual entrepreneurs and small media firms. Web 3.0 and social media platforms have provided a unique opportunity for start-ups and small businesses, which enables them to propose value to the demanding customers (Labafi and Williams, 2018). The Web 3.0 concept describes social communication platforms that adds the element of cooperation to the communication characteristics evident in Web 2.0 and the cognition characteristic evident in Web 1.0 (^{Fochs, 2017}). Social media platforms enables media and technological start-ups to offer their innovations without market entry barriers. Today, social media platforms is a significant breeder of entrepreneurial pursuits.

The entrepreneurial possibilities created by web 3.0 has been of interest to researchers in the study of media entrepreneurship. The value proposition presented by social media platforms has led to a heightened interest in its utilization for entrepreneurial activities by creative individuals and small firms.. Hoag and compain (2006) were the first scholars who presented a definition for media entrepreneurship. Since then, several scholars have studied this subject. These scholars include, ^{Hoag (2008)}, ^{Achtenhagen (2008}, 2017), ^{Hang (2016)}, ^{Will et al (2016)}, ^{Khajeheian (2016}, 2017), ^{Price-Schultz and Jones (2017)}, and ^{Hasenpusch and Baumann (2017)}. In most recent and comprehensive definition, ^{Khajeheian (2017)} defined media entrepreneurship as “ taking the risk to exploit opportunities (creation/ discovery) by innovative use of (radical/incremental/imitative) resources (ownership/control) in transform of an idea into activities to offer value (creation/delivery) in a media form (content/platform/user data) that meets the need of a specific portion of market (businesses or consumers), either in an individual effort or by creation of new venture or entrepreneurial managing of an existing organizational entity and to earn benefit (money/attention/favourite behaviour) from one of the sources that is willing to pay for (direct consumers, advertisers, data demanders or any customer of generated information of consumers).”

The interest in this subject experienced a sharp growth in 2017. This signalled the growing importance of web platforms and social media to entrepreneurial activities. Within this time, there was also significant growth to social media start-ups and firms. They provided economic contribution via employment and innovation. Growth in these areas increased the importance of media entrepreneurship as an area of interest and as a field of study.

THE WAY FORWARD:

In order to get to a comprehensive look at Media entrepreneurship in web 1.0 , we have considered three different aspects. The first aspect is the need for infrastructure that supports businesses and start-ups; and of course the need for sustainable approaches that guarantee the future of these businesses in their dynamic environment. These infrastructures includes different needs needed to fulfil some entrepreneurial approaches. These approaches are, namely, social needs, environmental needs, economic needs and future needs of next generations. On the other hand, there are needs for driving forces that will ensure that the momentum for these businesses is always available when needed. Furthermore, that energy can be guaranteed to enable the continuous movement of media entrepreneurship towards newer goals in future.

We have summarized these driving forces as Head, Hand, Heart and Harmony. We need some activities to be done in media entrepreneurship (which is the Hand) otherwise this driving force may stop. Some policies and strategic approaches on media entrepreneurship need to make, and improve (Head) upon media entrepreneurship practices. This field also needs people who are interested in enhancing its impact on society and they have to love this businesses otherwise the profit making approach will become the dominant approach here (Heart). Lastly we need some international and national entities to have the responsibility of harmonizing and balancing all activities in this field (Harmony). The last thing we need to consider is the internal concerns of Media Entrepreneurship which we have divided it to three main dimensions namely: Content, Context and Consequences (3C Model). Of course we need to have it in mind that almost all these approaches can perform better in a web 3.0 environment.

There is a diverse set of criteria in each dimension of our proposed model, so we have presented the schematic model below not to make the descriptions longer, and some suggestions for future researches, according to this model, are provided later.

ARTICLES IN THIS SPECIAL ISSUE:

This opening article of this special issue provides an insight about the status of media entrepreneurship research and the methodological challenges that the researchers in the field are facing with. Datis Khajeheian, who is one of the leading scholars in the media entrepreneurship researches, firstly provides the status of research in this field by citing most of conducted researches in the recent two decades. Then he addresses the challenges that he has been faced with, as a professor in supervising and as a scholar in review of researches. In particular, he clarifies the difference between some terms that are interchangeably used in the subject research and suggest the researchers to use these methodological terms in the right place. This article can be used as a guideline for nascent researchers.

Since the very first media entrepreneurship researches, the qualitative approach has been the dominant and most of researches have been done by qualitative methods.In the article 2 of this special issue, Roshandel Arbatani, Kawamorita, Ghanbary and Ebrahimi, finally fill the gap of lack of quantitative researches and present a quantitative model of media entrepreneurship. by use of SEM and MLP-ANN, they developed Khajeheian’s framework (2013) that is the most cited framework in Media Entrepreneurship study. They ranked the involving factors of media entrepreneurship and showed how policy makers can prioritize them for development of media entrepreneurship in social media platforms.

The article 3 is an empirical investigation on the impact of media convergence on the exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities. Salamzadeh, Radovic Markovic and Memar Masjed surveyed 119 cofounders of small and medium sized media enterprises with an online questionnaire and analysed the collected data with regression analysis. The findings reveal that four types of divergence, including media distribution channels, media content producers, audiences, and advertisers, affect exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities in small and medium sized media firms.

The article 4 is a survey that measures the performance of corporate entrepreneurship activities in Iranian media firms, using linear regression. Zahra Minafam shows that the rate of product innovation is highly effected by corporate media entrepreneurship, and revealed that media entrepreneurship in corporate level leads to new and innovative products.

The article 5 addresses corporate media entrepreneurship too, and investigates the subject of open innovation in public service broadcasts as a way to access the external sources of creativity. By conducting 17 interviews with top ranked managers of Iranian public service broadcast (IRIB), and thematic analysis of interviews’ codes, Sharifi, Khajeheian and Samadi suggest that Iranian media environment is ineftcient because of a lack of intermediary firms that facilitate connection of large organization with innovative small enterprises and creative individuals. They showed that IRIB can access the external sources of ideas with assisting the creation and development of such intermediaries.

The article 6 uses a recently popular research method of social network analysis to understand how buyers of Digikala, the prominent Iranian online retailing, act and behave in twitter. Sharafi Frarzad, Kolli, Soltani and Ghanbary collected and analysed the tweets in the Black-Friday, when online retailers offer discounts on the products, and found that negative tweets have been significantly more than positive tweets, mainly pointing on false pricing and discount, fake goods. They suggest that Web 3.0 platforms need to pay suftcient attention to the reflection of their services in social media platforms, because the negative feedback may destroy their reputation. Following the above articles that are in the subject of media entrepreneurship, there are three articles that are not in the scope of the special issue, but investigates managerial subjects that is in the scope of journal of Ad-minster. These three articles are as follow:

The article 7 studies a rarely-investigated aspect of media platforms: the digital footprint and its application in recruitment. Boudlaie, Nargesian and Keshavarz Nik showed that human resource managers now use social media of applicants to better understand the candidates for a vacant position. By study of the human resource managers of two banks, they conducted 10 interviews and by thematic analysis of codes extracted three major themes: increase in complexity of employment process, optimization due to acquiring vision from the applicants, and retention of employees. In the article 8, Ghashami, Alborzi, Movahedi Sobhani and Radfar address the idea of choosing the most appropriate method for implementing a business intelligent system in organizations with different maturity level. The purpose of this research is to provide a basis for choosing the appropriate approach for implementing business intelligence systems in organizations. The result is a fuzzy model that shows the best executive packages to implement business intelligence based on data (size and maturity of an organization). The present research is carried out in banking industry in two parts. The first part presents a model for selecting a method for implementing business intelligent systems based on the maturity of the organization and in second part, the proposed model has been tested. This model is proposed by considering issues related to the implementation of business intelligent systems in organizations and the output of the model consists of 5 different implementation packages in 5 levels of organizational maturity. Finally, the authors argue that the implementation of business intelligent systems in any organization should be consistent with the level of maturity and intelligence in the organization, and also by using IT tools in the implementation of business intelligent systems, the success can be Guaranteed.

In the article 9 Ebrahimi, Ghaderifar , Jamali Moghadam, Manuchehrian and Arfa ranked factors influencing brand imitation. This study recognizes the important factors that affect brand imitation and rank them according to the importance level. Factor ranking has been implemented by using the Rough-TOPSIS method. The results emphasize that the law is the most important factor that can prevent imitation of brand and fraud. This ranking helps companies increase the security of their brands. Paper has contribution in this field. First, this study collects and evaluates the imitation factors, while previous studies have identified only stimulatory factors for imitation. Second, authors have used the TOPSIS-Rough methodology for ranking, which develops the theoretical approach to this field. Finally, this study compared the results of TOPSIS-Rough with TOPSIS-Fuzzy results to increase the validity.

Javadi Yeganeh in the article 10 uses game theory to investigate why Iranians refuse the government requests to give up their public subsidies. A multiplier prisoner’s dilemma used for two groups of people who did not applied for subsidies and those who applied in spite of no need to those subsidies as the sample of study. The findings of this paper is very useful for policy makers to understand how the people act and reflect to their policies.

RESEARCH STREAMS FOR FUTURE:

Based on our model, below are some suggestions for future research on media entrepreneurship to make. It can be one of the main ways toward empowering this emerging field of research and for sure, new ideas can come up from this process.

We, as the guest editors, wish you will find the articles of this special issue useful and insightful. And we hope that media entrepreneurship as an area of interest will benefit from the selected papers of this special issue and will help the development of this subject.